Thursday, 7 July 2011

Is this the end of Skype?

Friends around the world

You know we don't like Facebook (mainly because we're wrinklies and low tech). We love Skype, though, because its free/cheap. But Microsoft took over Skype in May and now Facebook is using Skype for video calling on the world's largest social network. As it says on a Facebook blog: "Video chat has been around for years now, but it's still not an everyday activity for most people. Sometimes it's too difficult to set up, or the friends you want to talk to are on different services. So a few months ago, we started working with Skype to bring video calling to Facebook. We built it right into chat, so all your conversations start from the same place. To call your friend, just click the video call button at the top of your chat window. For those of us who have been working on this, it's particularly exciting to bring video calling to over 750 million people. We're making this available in over 70 different languages, so friends can stay in touch all over the world. Video calling will be available to everyone over the next few weeks, but if you don't want to wait, you can get it now." (This last link comes up with the statement: Something went wrong. Yeah, right!)